1. Getting out of life alive Not Dead

Where do you start? What should you start, and how?

Where have you been, where are you now and where do you want to be?

In the present world of expectations and disappointment, hidden threats and clear danger, there are many ways to die, not the least of which is consciously—choosing death over life or surrendering in full consciousness and potential.

You are among the survivors, a quick study, awake and sturdy, an able individual who knows when to follow and when to fall behind. Neither solider nor stranger to structured living, you play the game well, even if it disgusts you—trusting to be trusted, serving to be served, obeying to command to one day transcend, neither master nor slave, even to yourself.

But none of this is easy.

Daily you encounter possibility—and daily, duplicity. Danger. Disaster. You give in to things you know will harm you and give up passions when they get too hard. The deficit of gratification pushes you not onward but in tiresome circles:

• You deceive yourself.
• You willfully distract.
• With excuse after excuse you defend yourself when showing up late or not at all in your own life.

Granted, the world is scary—perilous and in peril. Social forces push you in uncomfortable places. Controlled political climates stifle and confound. You swear it’s worse now than it was for your parents, and your children will damn you for the mess you’ll leave behind.

But the conditions have not and will not change—nor has or will the presentation. But now more than any other Not Dead generation, you are aware of the presentation as a presentation—and you are sickened by the medium. The sleekness of the packaging. The slickness of the language. You understand the reasoning behind the machinery even if you disagree with it—but you cannot stop, escape or ignore it.

Not because prosperity or disaster is just around the corner.

Prosperity and disaster are here.

Where do you turn for help? Professionals? Corpse pose? The people around you who are equally lost, if not the architects of your misery? Is “help” even a useful word, suggestive as it is that you don’t get it?

Though perceptions have changed, biology and bureaucracy have not. You are ill equipped mentally, emotionally and socially, and civic instruction has not kept pace. Skilled with detecting condescension and deceit, you must approach dilemma with a system of honest inquiry. You must strive for wellness not with the premise that you want to be better or to perform your best, but with the acknowledgment you are broken and just want to be good.

You want to be okay in this perpetual state of emergency. If you must wrestle—and you must—with truth and trust, artifice and agenda, the paranoia is founded and the trauma is real.

You want more than a series of attachments to and detachments from this world. You want understanding—and the assurance you’ll be all right.

The sharpest tool. The prettiest dying star.

Both lock and key to all of life’s mystery, misery, magic and dread.